Bruce Handy on the 2012 Oscar Nominations: There’s a Lot of Dessert on This Menu

The list of nine Academy Award nominees for best picture is about as respectable and unembarrassing as one could hope for in this day and age, with the exception of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a film that by most accounts manages the unlikely feat of being both twee and about 9/11—a combination as misguided-sounding as that of director Stephen Daldry’s last movie, The Reader, also an improbable nominee, which asked viewers to shed tears for a learning-disabled Nazi prison-camp guard. Not long ago, I wrote a post about deliberately notseeing Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; but now, as a masochistic exercise in self-discipline—the moviegoer’s version of training for a marathon or learning to walk on hot coals—I will watch Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in tandem with another seeming chore of a movie I have been avoiding, Hostel 2, and report back to you on which proves the most excruciating.

Nothing on this year’s list grabbed the Zeitgeist by the throat the way The Social Network did last year; its loss to the charming but thin The King’s Speech would have been a travesty if the Oscars merited such a strong word. A fleeting disappointment, let’s say. My vote this year, if I had one, would go to The Tree of Life. It is by far the most original and peculiar of the nominees—that carries a lot of weight with me—as well as the most ambitious, a truly cosmic epic that, the more I think about it, plays like a spiritual, humanist, mostly earthbound response to Stanley Kubrick’s chilly, ironic, and ultimately misanthropic 2001: A Space Odyssey(a movie I love despite that description). Maybe taciturn writer-director Terrence Malick will give an interview someday, and then someone can ask whether or not he had Kubrick in mind. Until then, the fact that both movies run off the rails in pursuit of transcendence only adds to their odd kinship, and odder appeal; if only Sean Penn had turned into a giant space fetus at the end of The Tree of Life! Also, as fun as Brad Pitt was to watch in Moneyball, he should have been nominated for his performance here, where he made a difficult character sympathetic through acting rather than through just being Brad Pitt.

The rest of the nominees? There’s a lot of dessert on this menu. I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying The Artist—and bravo to writer-director Michel Hazanavicius for making people interested in silent movies, however briefly—but it’s a trifle. The same goes for Midnight in Paris, a confection that manages to be cake and eat it, too, bemoaning nostalgia while indulging in it. But would Midnight in Paris make anyone’s list of the 10 best Woody Allen films, or even the 20 best? (Not that we shouldn’t applaud a filmmaker able to bounce back so wonderfully, after making something as cringe-inducing as Whatever Works, his dreadful 2009 comedy with Larry David and my nominee for his worst-ever movie.)

Like The Artist, Hugoand War Horse are love letters to filmmaking, but they’re both among the slightest films ever made by their directors, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, though Hugo might deserve a special Oscar for its breathtaking use of 3-D. Spielberg’s other 2011 movie, The Adventures of Tintin, was even slighter than War Horse, though a better film, I think, and certainly more fun; it also made unusually good use of 3-D—not surprising in either case, given that Scorsese and Spielberg are both master craftsmen. And who would begrudge them making any movie they want? We should be glad they still want to hassle with sets and studio executives and grips and actors. But it’s bad enough The Departed won best picture and Scorsese a best-director Oscar, succeeding where the likes of Goodfellas and Raging Bull failed. Hugo? Really?

To my taste, the movie most overlooked today was Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s two-part story about weddings, depression, and the end of the world, which, though uninterested in life’s origins or meaning (shrug), chases after profundity every bit as much as The Tree of Life and 2001; it somehow manages to split the difference between the former’s empathy and the latter’s misanthropy—not a bad place to be. Also, Melancholia was probably the single most beautiful film I saw all year. Many commentators have cited the suped-up B-movie Drive as another unfairly ignored best-picture contender—a B+ movie, say. Which is how I’d grade this year’s overall list.

One other note: this year’s acting nominees are unusually short of the traditional afflictions. There’s Max von Sydow’s mute from Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and the dementia of Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.Otherwise, no madness, no paralysis, no mental retardation, no wasting illnesses, not even a speech impediment, royal or common. Will this scramble calculations for next year’s Oscar derby?